LONDON.- Christie’s will present Francis Bacon’s Portrait of Man with Glasses III (1963; estimate: £6,000,000-9,000,000) as a major highlight of its 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 5 March 2025. Coming from an important private British collection, the painting is a masterpiece from a defining time in the artist’s career and is offered at auction for the very first time.
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Portrait of Man with Glasses III has been extensively exhibited worldwide, featuring in 17 major international retrospectives and serving as the cover image for the catalogue of the Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2013. Most recently, it was displayed at London’s National Portrait Gallery as part of Francis Bacon: Human Presence, reaffirming its status as a cornerstone of Bacon’s oeuvre.
Exemplifying the formal freedom and intensity that characterised Bacon’s works of the early 1960s, the painting’s bold brushstrokes, flashes of raw canvas, and dark, enigmatic spectacles create a dynamic and deeply expressive image, reflecting the evolution of Bacon’s artistic practice. The painting’s distorted yet captivating features reflect Bacon’s deep exploration of emotion, form, and the human condition: the bared teeth, rendered with thick impasto and delicate colour, embody his ambition to “paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset”, as quoted in D. Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon.
The mouth is the centrepiece of so many of Bacon’s masterpieces from the toothy jaws of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944, Tate, London), to his crucial first ‘Heads’ and screaming ‘Popes’, to his howling animals and even the portraits of his closest friends: Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud and George Dyer. The mouth, for Bacon, was a site of sensuality, laughter and conversation. In Portrait of Man with Glasses III, the mouth becomes a thing of mobile, shimmering splendour.
1963 was a pivotal year for Francis Bacon bookended by two milestone moments in his career. In 1962 he was awarded his first museum retrospective at Tate, London and at the end of 1963 he opened his first major US exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, cementing his status as one of the most significant artists of his time. It also marked a moment of transformation for the artist who was still meditating upon the loss of his great love, Peter Lacy but was shortly to encounter his greatest muse, George Dyer. Bacon appears energised, filled with the inspiration that was to create some of the greatest masterpieces of the 20th century.
In 1963, his technique also evolved to include texture and colour in a radical way. In Portrait of Man with Glasses III we see the artist celebrate the natural qualities of the raw canvas, celebrating both negative and positive space. He drags dry paint into powerful strokes, using textured fabrics like the cuff of his corduroy jacket to stipple the surface. The black void sparkles with silver; an enigmatic backdrop to his anonymous protagonist. The face twists like a chrysalis, capturing a moment of metamorphosis that reflects the profound influence of Picasso, whose radical reimagining of the human head - its features distorted, rearranged, and seen from multiple angles at once - was foundational to Bacon’s artistic evolution.
Katharine Arnold, Vice Chairman 20th/21st Century Art and Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Europe, Christie’s London: “Portrait of Man with Glasses III, 1963 is a masterpiece by Francis Bacon. Recently included in the magnificent portrait exhibition Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery it holds an extraordinary gravitational pull. The painting embodies all of the complex brilliance of the artist who once declared his passion for the mouth and his desire to paint it as Monet had mastered the sunset. From his screaming Popes and howling animals to the enigmatic grins of his cast of friends, the mouth was not only the source of the existential scream but the site of sensuality, laughter and conversation. Portrait of Man with Glasses III features a mouthful of delicate teeth, while his glasses slide in the flurry of movement conjured by the artist’s brushstrokes. The sister painting to this wonderful portrait sits in the Seattle Museum of Art. It is a privilege to be offering this iconic picture that holds such an important place in the artist's oeuvre at auction for the first time at Christie’s”.
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